The New Space Invaders
Spies In The Sky

For decades they were guardians —
mysterious warriors who straddled the globe searching for secrets that
would prevent a nuclear holocaust. But now, the new technology of the
post-Cold War world has suddenly transformed the West's leading
spymasters into sinister shadows manipulating a massive surveillance
system that can capture and study every telephone call, fax and e-mail
message sent anywhere in the world.

These high-tech espionage agents from Canada, the United
States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand — backed up by a web of
ships, planes and radar and communication interception sites that ring
the earth — have established the greatest spy network in history. Its
name is Echelon.

Originally devoted solely to monitoring the military and
diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies,
today Echelon searches for hints of terrorist plots, drug-dealer's
plans and political and diplomatic intelligence. But critics claim the
system is also being used for crass commercial theft and a brutal
invasion of privacy on a staggering scale.

On Tuesday, the European Union's parliament will open a
major international debate on the spy practices of the world's five
leading English-speaking nations, claiming that this electronic
espionage ring, led by the United States and Britain, is methodically
going where it has no right to go. The EU's civil liberties committee
is expected to accuse Britain of aiding the United States in conducting
economic and commercial espionage on a grand scale at the expense of
its European partners. A special 112-page expose of the spy network
prepared for the EU last spring declares that the rapid proliferation
of surveillance technologies presents "a serious threat to the civil
liberties in Europe" with "awesome implications."

"There is wide-ranging evidence indicating that major
governments are routinely utilizing communications intelligence to
provide commercial advantage to companies and trade," declared Duncan
Campbell, the report's author, a Scottish physicist and researcher who
has devoted 20 years to studying electronic espionage.

Moreover, research about to be released by the EU's
Scientific and Technical Options Assessment office is expected to
document how deeply Echelon has penetrated Europe. It will outline ways
to combat the espionage assault.

At the same time:

- Jean-Pierre Millet, a Parisian lawyer, has launched a
class-action lawsuit against the governments of the United States and
Britain, claiming the Echelon spy network has robbed European
industries of some of their most cherished trade secrets and undercut
their bargaining positions in trade deals.

- Parliamentarians in Italy, Germany and Denmark are
demanding public investigations of the spy network.

- Privacy advocates in the U.S. have launched a court
case demanding access to government documents on Echelon under the
Freedom of Information Act.

- Several leading politicians are calling for the first
Congressional hearings to review U.S. intelligence-gathering practices
since the Watergate era.

- On the Internet, privacy advocates, computer hackers
and journalists are engaged in near-hysterical searches for signs of
Echelon's presence. Several new Internet Web sites have sprung up
devoted solely to documenting information on Echelon and pressing for
public investigations into the surveillance system.

"Echelon is a black box, and we really don't know what
is inside it," says Barry Steinhardt, of the American Civil Liberties
Union. "We don't know who is being targeted, what they are being
targeted for or what is being done with the information."

The Echelon system is simple in design. All members of
the English-speaking alliance are part of the UKUSA intelligence
alliance that has maintained ties since the Second World War. These
states have positioned electronic-intercept stations and deep-space
satellites to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and
fibre-optic communications traffic. The captured signals are then
processed through a series of supercomputers, known as dictionaries,
that are programmed to search each communication for targeted
addresses, words, phrases or even individual voices.

Individual states in the UKUSA alliance are assigned
responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's
main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet
Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be
picked up from our embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War
era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite and
radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America,
primarily in an effort to track drugs and thugs in the region.

The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites
and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic
Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west
of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications
originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand
sweeps the western Pacific.

"Most people just don't understand how pervasive
government surveillance is," warns John Pike, a leading military
analyst with the Washington-based American Federation of Scientists.
"If you place an international phone call, the odds that the [U.S.]
National Security Agency are looking is very good. If it goes by
oceanic fibre-optic cable, they are listening to it. If it goes by
satellite, they are listening to it. If it is a radio broadcast or a
cellphone conversation, in principle, they could listen to it. Frankly,
they can get what they want."

Experts stress that Echelon is simply a method of
sorting captured signals and is just one of the many new arrows in the
intelligence community's quiver, along with increasingly sophisticated
bugging and interception techniques, satellite tracking,
through-clothing scanning, automatic fingerprinting and recognition
systems that can recognize genes, odours or retina patterns.

The Americans dominate the UKUSA alliance, providing
most of the computer expertise and frequently much of the personnel for
global interception bases. The U.S. National Security Agency,
headquartered in Fort Meade, Md., just outside Washington, has a global
staff of 38,000 and a budget estimated at more than $3.6-billion (all
dollar figures US unless otherwise specified). That's more than the FBI
and the CIA combined.

By comparison, Canada's communications-intelligence
operations are conducted by the Communications Security Establishment
(CSE), a branch of the National Defence Department. It has a staff of
890 people and an annual budget of $110-million (Cdn). The CSE's
headquarters, nicknamed "The Farm," is the Sir Leonard Tilley Building
on Heron Road in Ottawa, and its main communications intercept site is
located on an old armed-forces radio base in Leitrim, just south of
Ottawa.

Though shrouded in secrecy to the extent that American
officials used to joke NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say
Anything," few foreign-affairs analysts are surprised by the sweep or
appetite of electronic spies and they caution against taking Europe's
angry protestations of dismay at face value.

"The EU hearings are a bit of a joke," says Wayne
Madsen, a former NSA employee and senior fellow at the Washington-based
Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC). "It's going to be a bit
like that scene in the movie Casablanca, where Inspector Renault
declares: 'I'm shocked to find gambling in this establishment.' "

"The fact is the German Greens and the French Socialists
and Gaullists can pull their hair out and say, 'This is terrible,' but
their countries are involved in this stuff. The French have an
extensive signals intelligence network of their own. I think what is
going to happen is there will be a lot of wringing of hands and
gnashing of teeth, but then business is going to go on as usual."

But the real issue is whether UKUSA's spies are using
electronic espionage to get commercial information.

"Since the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the
intelligence agencies have searched for a new justification for their
surveillance capability in order to protect their prominence and their
bloated budgets," says Patrick Poole, deputy director of the Centre of
Technology at Washington's Free Congress Federation. "Their solution
was to redefine the notion of national security to include economic,
commercial and corporate concerns.

"By redefining the term 'national security' to include
spying on foreign competitors of prominent U.S. corporations, the
signals-intelligence game has gotten ugly."

Lately there has been a frenzy of concern over possible
American economic espionage in Europe.

- Yesterday, a French intelligence report accused U.S.
secret agents of working with computer giant Microsoft to develop
software allowing Washington to spy on computer users around the world.
It claims that the National Security Agency helped install secret
programs on Microsoft software, currently in use of 90% of computers.

- In 1990 the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel claimed
NSA intercepted messages about a pending $200-million
telecommunications deal between Indonesia and the Japanese satellite
manufacturer NEC Corp. George Bush, then the U.S. president, is said to
have intervened on the basis of the intelligence intercept and to have
convinced the Indonesians to split the contract between NEC and
U.S.-owned AT&T.

- Last spring's EU report on electronic spying says that
U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted phone calls between Brazilian
officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF in 1994 and used the
information to swing a $1.3-billion radar contract to the U.S.
corporation Raytheon.

Mike Frost, a former CSE employee and author of
Spyworld, which is about his career in Canada's secret service, claims
that as far back as 1981 Canada was using its U.S.-produced spy
technology to eavesdrop on the American ambassador to Ottawa. In one
instance, Canadian spies managed to overhear the ambassador discussing
a pending trade deal with China on a mobile telephone and used that
information to undercut the Americans in landing a $2.5-billion Chinese
grain sale.

On another occasion, in 1983, Mr. Frost says British
intelligence officials invited their Canadian counterparts to come to
London to eavesdrop on two British cabinet ministers whose political
loyalty was doubted by Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime
minister. Since it would have been illegal for British officials to do
the surveillance themselves, they had the Canadians do the job using
eavesdropping equipment in the Canadian embassy. After three weeks of
snooping, the Canadians quietly turned over all their findings to the
British, Mr. Frost says.

"It should hardly be surprising that Echelon ends up
being used by elected and bureaucratic officials to their political
advantage or by the intelligence agencies themselves for the purpose of
sustaining their privileged powers and bloated budgets," says Mr.
Poole. "The availability of such invasive technology practically begs
for abuse."

Ottawa bureaucrat Claude Hisson, the commissioner for
the Communications Security Establishment, is charged with
investigating any complaints into CSE operations. In his most recent
annual report, he admits that, on occasion, our spies intercept private
conversations. But he insists there is nothing to worry about. "The
sophistication of CSE's technology has led to speculation about the
organization's capability to intercept the communications of
Canadians," Mr. Hisson says.

"However, I have observed that CSE's activities are
driven not by the capabilities of the technology it deploys but by its
mandate to fulfill the foreign intelligence requirements established by
the Government of Canada. ... In keeping with the policy of the
government, CSE goes to considerable effort to avoid collecting
Canadian communications."

Still, critics of Echelon warn the potential for abuse
never goes away.

"This whole thing is so bizarrely powerful that the
opportunity or temptation for abuse is fairly substantial," says Mr.
Pike of the American Federation of Scientists. "How many people in your
organization always obey the rules?

"The notion that NSA or any other of these spy networks
is the only large organization in human history in which everyone
always obeys the rules just flies in the face of common sense," he
says.